ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A top official of the Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga forces warned that the Islamic State remains an immediate threat to domestic and international security, adding that the group had killed, injured, or kidnapped more than one thousand people in Iraq over the past year alone.
"ISIS is still standing and posing a threat to the Kurdistan Region, Iraq, and the whole world," Jabar Yawar, Secretary General of the Ministry of Peshmerga, told reporters in Erbil on Saturday.
Yawar's statement comes after the Iraqi Parliament, in response to the US killing of top Iranian general Qasim Soleimani, voted on a resolution to expel all "foreign" forces from Iraqi territory. Notably, the only parties participating in the session were from camps opposed to the American presence in the country.
The vote was not attended by Kurdish lawmakers, who have said that the US-led Coalition is crucial in the continued fight against the Islamic State, nor most Sunni representatives.
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Yawar continued, "In 2018, according to a survey we conducted, ISIS carried out 456 terrorist operations in which 1,742 people were killed, wounded, or kidnapped."
According to these numbers, he explained, the extremist organization has more than doubled the casualties caused by its operations in 2019, adding up to a total of 1,058.